“I don’t know if whoever is hiring the killers is going for money or just plain blood revenge,” I said, “but I think you might have some of the answers.”
When I was finished I waited for a response. He stared into the fire, remaining silent.
“Mr. Shaw?” I said.
“Sometimes it speaks to me,” he said. His voice was a listless monotone, as gray and pale as his coloring.
“Who?” I asked.
He pointed at the fire. “It speaks single words directly to my thoughts. Sometimes I listen to it for hours.”
All right, I thought, I’ll hitch a ride on his downtown train. “What does it say?”
For the first time he turned his head and looked at me. His eyes were watery and weary. It was tiring just to look at him. “It says ‘cut’ or ‘hammer’ or ‘blood’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘fly’ or ‘escape,’ just single words over and over.”
“What’s it saying now?” I asked, realizing he had been nodding not at my explanation but at the voice of the fire.
“It’s saying, ‘Alive,’ ” he said. “ ‘Alive. Alive. Alive.’ ”
“Who’s alive, Mr. Shaw?”
“She is. Alive. Again.”
“Who, Mr. Shaw?”
“My mother. Alive.”
I suddenly leaned back in my chair. I couldn’t help but look up at the portrait staring down at me. From this angle it almost seemed as if she were smiling.
“I thought she died just over a year ago,” I said.
“No, no, she’s alive,” he said, his voice growing suddenly more agitated. He reached out from his chair and grabbed my sleeve. “She’s alive, I know it. I’ve seen her.”
“You’ve seen her? When?”
He tugged at my sleeve harder. “A week ago. Outside. Come, I’ll show you.”
He let go of me and spun his wheelchair away from the fire, rolling it toward one of the windows with a telescope beside it. I followed behind him. When he reached the curtain he opened it with a strong pull. An invasion of light streamed in, so bright and unhindered I had to turn my face away until my eyes adjusted. When I turned back I could see through the window’s bars to the rear yard of the house, straight down the hill to the pond.
“Less than a week ago I saw her in her garden,” he said.
From the window there was a clear view to the overgrown hedges and wild flowers of Faith Reddman’s garden. From here the mazelike pattern was much clearer and in the center clearing I could see the shape of the bench that had been devoured by the orange flowering vines.
“I saw the light,” he said. “She was there. She was digging in her garden in the middle of the night. I saw the light, I heard the clang of her shovel. I swear it.”
“I believe you saw the light, Mr. Shaw.”
“She’s come back.”
“Why has she come back, Mr. Shaw?”
“She’s come back to take me away, to save me. That’s why she’s waiting in the house, waiting for me.”
“What house is she waiting in, Mr. Shaw?”
“The old house, the old Poole house. I’ve seen her there, at night. I’ve seen the lights through the trees.”
“In the house by the pond?”
“Yes, she’s there, waiting.” He suddenly looked away from the window and stared at me with his watery eyes. “Will you take me there? Will you? I can’t go myself because of my legs. But I’m light now. You can carry me.”
He reached out and gripped again at my sleeve. It was frightening to see the yearning work its way beneath his slack face. This is a man worth half a billion dollars, I thought. What happiness has it bought him? I turned my face away and looked at the garden once more and then altered my focus.
“Why are there bars on your windows, Mr. Shaw?”
He dropped his head and let go of my arm. Slowly he spun his wheelchair around and rolled back to the fire. He leaned toward the glowing heat, listening. I stared at him, his color washed completely away by the sunlight now flooding through the window.
I looked around once more. This room reeked of a single personality, yes, but if the personality that had created and maintained it once belonged to this man it had clearly fled. Nothing was left but a shell. I had intended to ask him about Caroline’s paternity, about the Wergeld Trust, about the Pooles, but I would get no answers from what remained of this man. I walked over to the bookshelves and their heavy tomes. Leather-bound volumes of the great works of literature, Dickens and Hugo and Balzac and Cervantes, each spine perfectly smooth. I took out volume one of Don Quixote. It was a beautifully made book, the boards thick, the leather hand-tooled and leafed in gold. The binding cracked when I opened it. I remembered that Selma Shaw had told me she had been brought to Veritas because her future husband had difficulty reading. I remembered the disappointment in Faith Shaw’s diary over young Kingsley’s failures in his studies.
“Do you read much?” I asked.
He responded as if I were merely an inconvenient distraction pulling him away from the voice of the fire. “No.”
“Don’t you like books?”
“The letters mix themselves up on the page.”
Dyslexia? Is that why he had so much trouble learning to read as a boy? Then why are there so many books in his room? I wondered. Why would a problem reader surround himself with such potent reminders of his failings? Was it pretension? Was it merely a facade, like Gatsby’s library with its uncut pages, or was it something else? I closed the book and put it away and then looked around the room with newly opened eyes and a growing sense of horror.
“Do you hunt, Mr. Shaw?” I asked while I looked at the wall full of dead animal heads.
“Once I did,” he said.
“Are these your trophies?”
“No. They were my father’s.”
“Even the cat?”
“It’s a cougar,” he said in his distracted monotone.
“Is that your father’s too?”
“No,” he said. “Everything but the cougar.”
I stepped slowly toward the cougar head, its eyes dazed, its yellow teeth bared. There was a brass plate beneath the ruffed fur of its neck. It said something I couldn’t read for the tarnish, but I could make out the date: 1923. I felt colder than before. This wasn’t just any cougar, I was certain, this was the cougar that had slipped down from the mountains to terrorize the farms around Veritas in 1923. The same cougar Kingsley Shaw was aiming for in that dark rain-swept night when, with his mother by his side, he fired into his father’s chest. How could he live with that cat staring at him every day of his life, taunting him with that grin? And the ornate shotgun beside it, that gun, I realized, must be the gun.
I took a photograph out of my suit pocket and walked it to the fireplace to show to the man in the wheelchair. It was a photograph, removed from the metal box, of the unattractive young woman with the long face, the beady eyes, the unruly hair. “Do you know her?” I asked.
He took the photograph into his shaking hands and examined it closely. I wondered if he recognized her at all and then realized, when I saw a tear, that he did.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Why are you here?” he said, still staring at the photograph.
“I am trying to find out who is killing your children.”
“This is Miss Poole,” he said. “She was my friend from long ago. She read to me.”
“Do you know where she is or where her child is?”
“Why? Do you know her?” He smiled up at me with a hope that was at odds with everything he had shown me before. “Is she alive too?”
“I don’t know. Her father believed that your grandfather stole his company from him. Do you believe she could be responsible for hiring the man who killed your children?”